Blacked out
Nothing good happens under internet shutdown
Hello, readers! I’m Anna Baydakova, and this is Control, Spy, Delete, your weekly digest of the most important news on digital surveillance and online censorship around the globe.
Amid other disturbing news of the world, these days have been especially grim for the people of Iran, where thousands have been killed during unrelenting protests. And we don’t even really know how many – the Iranian regime has pulled the plug on the internet, cutting the country off from the rest of the world.
Censorship is never used to hide something good – it covers crimes, suffering, and blood. And even at this age, when so much technology is at our service, a rogue regime can still leave millions of people in the dark, unable to speak to their families or ask for help.
The most disturbing part is that it’s not just Iran. It can be any authoritarian country – any country where people have once decided that democracy no longer serves them, and there are things more important than human dignity and freedom.
And that’s another reason to keep an eye on everything that threatens our privacy and our right to speak, to connect, to learn and share knowledge. That’s what I’m trying to do here – subscribe, share and support this newsletter if you can!
Let’s get into it.
Biometrics briefing
Multiple U.S. retailers are now using facial recognition technology in their stores, including Whole Foods, Fairway, Macy’s, Wegmans, Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot and ShopRite. – Gothamist, CNN, CT Post
A group of Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would limit the use of ICE’s facial recognition app to ports of entry and ban the scanning of U.S. citizens. – 404 Media
The UK is now using facial recognition technology to prevent foreigners from entering the country illegally. – The Sun
Kyrgyzstan will begin using biometric voter verification in January 2027. – ID Tech Wire
Biometric voter verification kits malfunctioned during the presidential election in Uganda. – Uganda Radio Network
Iran stays offline
The most important story of this week is undoubtedly about online censorship reaching its peak in Iran, offering a fresh glimpse into how authoritarian regimes respond when events spiral beyond their control.
The country has been in turmoil since December 28. Protests erupted nation-wide as people took to the streets, fed up by economic hardship and the excesses of the ayatollahs’ regime.
Iranians began protesting before the New Year and, according to different estimates, thousands of people might have been killed by now. It’s hard to form a definitive picture of what’s happening in the country as a number of independent journalists have been imprisoned and those who remain free are struggling to get information out of Iran.
On the evening of Jan. 8, the authorities shut down the country’s internet connections as well as phone lines linking Iran to the rest of the world. The only way for Iranians to access the World Wide Web now is via Starlink satellite terminals, which are not legal in the country.
Authorities used several technical methods to cut the nation off from the global internet:
interfering with the Border Gateway Protocol connecting Iran’s part of the internet to the rest of it;
deep packet inspection, which allows to inspect parcels of data users send to each other and effectively block the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow people to access blocked websites;
operating a state-controlled, isolated domestic internet.
Iran has resorted to internet shutdowns during protests in the past. For example, it happened in 2019, when people rallied against high gasoline prices, and again during the 2022 protests, after Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police and died in custody. However, this shutdown is the longest one to date.
To stay connected to the rest of the world, Iranians have been actively smuggling Starlink terminals into the country – there are allegedly tens of thousands now in use across Iran. However, their work has become unstable recently, suggesting the government may have found a way to jam satellite signals as well, The Economist writes. Starlink itself said that it started providing free service to Iranian users, Bloomberg reports.
In the meantime, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers have written to Donald Trump asking him to greenlight collaboration between the State Department and the Open Technology Fund, a congressionally funded non-profit supporting technologies designed to overcome censorship. The goal is to help Iranians develop technological workarounds to the shutdown using VPNs and alternative communication tools, The Guardian reports.
The Iranian regime is far from the only one that believes cutting off communications can resolve a crisis and suppress dissent. China has kept its portion of the internet behind “The Great Firewall” for years. Russia has been building its own “sovereign internet” since 2019, framing it as protection against potential future cyberattacks from abroad. However, critics note that it looks more like an effort to establish total control over what Russians do online.
Right now, another country-wide internet shutdown is happening in Uganda, where a presidential election took place on Thursday and votes are currently being counted.
The authoritarian playbook is gaining popularity around the world by the day, and in the mouths of autocrats, “freedom of speech” means whatever they want it to. In this respect, Iran is just another example of how a government can try to reclaim control it’s about to lose. Will we see more internet shutdowns in the future or will we find new ways to keep people connected in any circumstances? Ironically, it can be both.
Have you been Flock’d?
Law enforcement agencies using Flock, a system of AI-powered license plate readers, inadvertently made their searches public due to redaction errors, 404 Media reports. Now you can check whether your license plate has ever been searched by police on HaveIBeenFlocked.com.
Police departments release the content of their searches in response to open records (FOIA) requests, which Cris van Pelt, the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, aggregates on the website. The database currently contains mentions of over 2.5 million license plates, according to the site’s statistics. Flock has been trying to shut the website down by sending takedown requests to the hosting providers Cloudflare and Hetzner, 404 Media wrote.
Meanwhile, researchers have found API keys allowing access to Flock’s customer data, which the company left unprotected due to misconfiguration – first noticed by Forbes. The exposed data includes the coordinates of 12,000 Flock cameras.
Flock has become notorious last year because its nation-wide system of smart license plate readers has been used by ICE, sparking public outrage. Flock has also been used by the police to monitor protest rallies and track a Texas woman who terminated her pregnancy.
Privacy activists have been keeping tabs on Flock and created a bunch of resources allowing people to put the cameras on the map and see if there are any in their area. There are self-organized anti-Flock groups, too. If you’re interested, check DeFlock, Eyes On Flock and alpr.watch.
ELITE knowledge for ICE
More details about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surveillance arsenal surfaced this week: 404 Media uncovered another product developed for ICE by Palantir, America’s surveillance tech giant.
According to materials obtained by reporters, Palantir is providing ICE with a tool for locating immigrants’ addresses, called “Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement” (ELITE). The software pulls information from the databases of the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and, allegedly, Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR.
Individuals are put on a visual map, and agents can see their name, photo, unique identifier, date of birth, and full address – with a “confidence score” showing how likely it is that the person currently resides at that address.
That’s just one part of a broad array of surveillance tools ICE has acquired over the past year, on which it has already spent $28.7 billion. If you read this article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you might get the impression that ICE is building a whole surveillance state on its own, with a budget of a middle-sized army. You might not be wrong.
AI for the subway surveillance
New York City’s transportation authority, MTA, is exploring whether it can use artificial intelligence to analyse subway video footage to detect weapons, monitor unattended items, and even anticipate stampedes, The City reports. MTA published a request for information and received interest from a number of technology companies before the New Year, reporters learned.
Subway systems have already become a frontline of high-tech surveillance elsewhere in the world, too. In Russia and Belarus, for example, the police extensively use facial recognition technology to find people on wanted lists as they enter subway stations. Those systems have also been used to detain and harass citizens who attend street protests, according to Radio Free Europe and BBC.
Censorship in Turkey, made in the U.S.
Another censorship story from the less-than-democratic parts of the world: U.S. tech giants stay compliant with Turkey’s regime of online censorship. A new report by a Turkish human rights group Freedom of Expression Association says that Meta and TikTok have been the fastest to satisfy the Turkish government’s requests for user data and content removal.
TikTok complied with government requests to remove content or block access in more than 90% cases, Meta granted 80% of the Turkish government’s requests for user information, and Instagram complied with about 80% of content removal requests in 2024, says Turkish Minute, citing the report.
Google, on the other hand, hasn’t shared its users’ information, except for emergency cases involving threats to life, according to the report. However, some Turkish news sites critical of the government dropped significantly in search results, which the report’s authors consider a form of “shadow” censorship.
Turkey typically coerces platforms into compliance through fines and “bandwidth throttling,” a practice when internet providers intentionally slow access to a website, making it difficult to use.
It’s the same choice for global content platforms everywhere: if a market is big enough and the local government wants some censorship, there will be censorship.
And that’s all from me for this week, guys.
Stay vigilant, keep your spirits up.
Anna